User:CaptainCalliope

Captain's Blog | Twitter | Google+ | Mozillians Profile

Note: I will be a Toronto site host for the Mozilla Summit! If you're going to be there, say hi!

Why Mozilla?

My personal mission is to increase the capacity of individual and collective human agency. In 2010, I began working with a few awesome peeps on our first non-profit startup. I'd spent the previous couple of years trying to wrap my mind around global challenges and looking for where solutions might be found to address 'root problems'. While in the midst of startup life, I was inspired by what Mozilla was doing around Drumbeat. When I saw that Mozilla was beginning work on B2G and Apps in 2010, the notion that Mozilla was positioning itself perfectly to be a root solution in solving global challenges began to take hold. And so I decided to become a Mozillian!

My framing of Mozilla is as an organization that provides infrastructure and support toward humanitarian development. In this capacity, it is one of the most accessibly powerful levers for gobal systemic change anyone can be a part of. This may not be the story Mozilla has told of itself in the past, but this is the story I see Mozilla growing into and I want to be a part of it!

What am I currently working on?

OpenBadges

I'm interested in the application of OpenBadges within the contexts of organizational learning and civic engagement. My hypothesis is that OpenBadges projects can be used to facilitate community driven technology roadmapping as part of larger cultural design processes. If I'm right, I could easily see myself working with and around the nascent OpenBadges ecosystem for at least the next decade.

Projects

• BrigadeBadges
• LettuceCreate.us

'Mowse'

'Mowse' is a codename that represents my big picture vision for Mozilla from a product strategy angle. I'm recruiting people to help me break my ambitious product ideas down into smaller pieces that can be prototyped and appropriately introduced into Mozilla's development processes.

EssenceAPI is the distillation of Mowse's essence into a 'cupcake sized' project. The technical lead for this is former Mozilla intern Jonathan Wilde.

If you're interested in learning more about Mowse, you can see the current draft of the concept here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:CaptainCalliope/Mowse

Community

If you're cyberstalking investigating me and have found yourself on this page, I'd like to invite you to join me at one of the public Mozilla community calls or Boston meetups that I frequent!

Community Calls I frequent

Weekly Webmaker Call

Weekly dial-in meeting, every Tuesday at 8am PST / 11am EST / 3pm GMT

For more information and links to the meeting Etherpad: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmakers/Community_Calls

Weekly OpenBadges Call

Weekly dial-in meeting, every Wednesday at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT

For more information: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges

For links to the meeting Etherpad, see the OpenBadges twitter account right before each meeting: http://twitter.com/openbadges

Boston

Mozilla Boston

I started organizing this meetup group a few months ago to get some local Mozilla action going. We will soon be kicking into high gear with hack nights every other Wednesday evening starting in October.

We held a Hive Popup event at the MIT Media Lab in August for Maker Party 2013. It was totally rad. Speaking of which...

MIT Media Lab

I'm an infiltrator at the MIT Media Lab! I go there every once in awhile to cowork and meet people I can cross-pollinate ideas, projects, and networks with. I consider myself a stowaway member of the Civic Media Lab, but hang out with Human Dynamics and other departments from time to time. I try to add value where I can and they haven't kicked me out yet.

If anyone needs a connection to someone at the MIT Media Lab, let me know and I will do what I can as an informal, unofficial, pirate liaison between Mozilla and the Media Lab.

Code for Boston

Code for America's Boston brigade has become my primary local community anchor here in Boston. We meet for hack nights every Tuesday evening at the Cambridge Innovation Center. Rather than work directly on civic tech projects, I work on culture hacking the group group infrastructure projects. BrigadeBadges is my primary project contribution to Code for Boston. Much more than a technology project, bringing OpenBadges into Code for Boston involves taking personal responsibility for various group functions (such as orienting new members) so I can document them, mentor others in these processes, and then figure out where badges make sense. We are literally blazing OpenBadge pathways as the group grows in number and sophistication!

I first got involved with Code for Boston when I helped co-organize RHoK Boston as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking(NDoCH).

Open Knowledge Foundation Meetup

Another nascent group, I'm essentially just pushing them to meet up with frequency. The Open Knowledge Foundation is starting up a Working Group around 'Open Data & My Data' and I'm flirting with the idea of doing some community organizing around Boston folk involved in Internet Identity stuff with OKFN Boston as the anchor.

Naturally, my ulterior motive would be to align anyone and everyone working on Internet Identity and personal data ownership with Mozilla Persona. ;)

Useful links

• IRC
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Help:Editing